Christian Tafdrup’s taut 2022 Danish horror movie Speak No Evil (streaming on Shudder) has 1 of the all-time bleak movie endings, a series designed to stick in viewers’ memories and haunt their dreams. James Watkins’ 2024 English-language remake approaches that ending… and then adds another half-hour or so of cathartic run-and-gun action, leading up to a radically different, much more Cinemascore-friendly, almost happily-ever-after-ish conclusion.
It’s a unusual approach for a remake, 1 that’s earned praise and contempt in equal measure. Remakes that change the ending of a memorable movie are nothing fresh — plenty of online discussion of Speak No Evil has referenced the 1988 Dutch movie The Vanishing, another breathtakingly dark thriller that got an improbable fresh finale for the American version. But the 2024 Speak No Evil feels unique in adding this much extra business, and pushing the movie into an entirely different genre, all to avoid a tragic wrap-up. It feels like a unusual form of fanfiction, someone’s “Yeah, but what if…” fantasy drawn out to almost bafflingly elaborate lengths.
Which got me thinking: What would any of the classical downbeat-ending genre movies look like if they were remade through a Speak No Evil lens? Warning: Spoilers ahead, both for any terrific films and for their imaginary remakes.
For reference: In both versions of Speak No Evil, a quiet and troubled household (father, mother, and anxious preteen daughter) meets a more outgoing household (father, mother, and withdrawn, silent preteen son) on vacation, admires their vivaciousness, and accepts an invitation to visit the bubblier family’s distant agrarian home. In both cases, the second household has a sinister plan for the first family. But while the first 2022 movie ends with that plan coming to awful, calculated fruition, the 2024 remake lets the second household find out what’s going on in time to fight back. As they gap up in a home and improvise defenses, the extended action edges a small besides far toward looking like a much gorier version of Home Alone. Here’s how that might play out for another movies.
Original ending: A group of Antarctic researchers encounter a murderous alien life-form that can mimic individual human forms. 1 by one, they get picked off and/or replaced by the alien, until only MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David) are left in the burning wreckage of their compound. Without shelter, stuck in a blizzard at night, and incapable to find whether 1 or the another of them is secretly a body-snatching alien, they settle down together to share any whiskey and wait for the end.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: MacReady says, “I’m not an alien, are you?” Childs says, “Nope!” They shake hands and agree to trust each other. The actual alien lunges up from behind a burning building and they punch it into insensibility and throw it into the fire, where it dies screaming. A rescue chopper shows up and they fly back to civilization and safety.
Six months later, they meet at a Parisian café to reminisce about their Antarctic adventures. Both of them say mildly ominous things that might lead the audience to fishy that 1 or both of them is inactive an alien, and creepy background music provides any extra tension. Then MacReady laughs, produces a petri dish and a lighter, and they both test their blood the way they did in the Antarctic lab. Nope, they’re inactive both human! They leave an extra-big tip for the waiter who has to throw distant the bloody petri dish.
Image: A24 / Everett Collection
Original ending: Dani (Florence Pugh), reeling with grief after her family’s death, accompanies her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) on vacation to the agrarian Swedish community of the Harga, who turn out to be pagan cultists. They execution Christian’s friends Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter) and lure Christian into a sexual ritual, which Dani spies on. Joining in with the cult’s rituals as their Queen of the May, she weeps and smiles as she oversees a second ritual, where Christian is stuffed into a bear carcass and placed in a burning pyramid to die, along with various another sacrifices.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: Adrenaline helps Christian fight the drug he was given. Realizing the bear carcass is fire-retardant, he kicks through the burning boards at the back of the pyramid and runs into the woods, where he finds Josh, inactive bleeding from the head but having escaped his would-be killer. Together, they ellipse back to the chicken coop to rescue fellow abroad vacationer Simon (Archie Madekwe) and treat his horrific wounds.
Simon improbably shakes off his injuries, as people in movies tend to. The 3 men improvise weapons and run around the Harga community, taking down anyone who gets in their way. Christian finds Dani and sincerely apologizes for stringing her on for so long. He admits he couldn’t handle her grief and that he’s been weak and immature. She admits that burning him alive for being a terrible boyfriend was going a small besides far, but says her experiences with the Harga have been cathartic and that she’s ready to effort therapy. They hug it out and agree to break up but stay friends. All 4 vacationers flee the community together. Josh writes an absolutely killer doctoral thesis. Mark stays dead.
Image: Universal Pictures / Everett Collection
Original ending: Put-upon bureaucrat Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), who frequently imagines himself as a fantasy hero, fights back against the oppressive dystopian bureaucracy he lives in, trying to rescue his dream girl, Jill (Kim Greist). Eventually, he’s captured and tortured, but he finds an escape in his fantasies.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: We got to see precisely what this looks like in the awful American tv cut of the movie, which eliminates more than half an hr of the run time, cuts the grim ending, and makes Sam’s final fantasy series the “real” finale. But for full Speak No Evil-level impact, the remake would request to add crucial action, not lose it. possibly the remake just includes 30 or so more minutes of imaginary-Sam flying around in his silver wingsuit and fighting weird symbolic creatures.
Night of the surviving Dead (1968)
Image: fresh Line Cinema/Everett Collection
Original ending: After resourcefully navigating a hellish zombie siege that kills everyone else holed up with him, Black survivor Ben (Duane Jones) is shot by a posse that casually mistakes him for a ghoul, in an ending that pointedly calls out American racism and uses imagery inspired by photography of American lynchings of Black citizens.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: Turns out the shot to the head killed Ben, but it was from a low-enough caliber bullet that it didn’t destruct his brain. erstwhile the posse lights the pyre they’re utilizing to dispose of corpses, zombie Ben rises and goes after his killers, for an additional 30 minutes of movie action where he pursues and mows down countless sneering rednecks. Eventually, he wanders north, where a cure for zombieism has been found, and he’s revived by helpful doctors. He goes on to teach endurance seminars and creates the first modern escape rooms.
Image: fresh Line / Everett Collection
Original ending: A religious-themed serial killer known as John Doe (Kevin Spacey) engineers a plan to execution 7 people in ways patterned after the 7 deadly sins. His last 2 victims are the detectives pursuing him, William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt), who he sets up as embodiments of Envy and Wrath, respectively, by arranging for Mills to receive a box that seemingly contains the head of Mills’ secretly pregnant wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). Mills shoots John Doe dead, as Doe had planned all along, and is taken distant in a semi-catatonic state.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: After Somerset’s tragic epigram at the end of the movie, he actually looks in the box and realizes it doesn’t contain Tracy’s head, it contains a crude cartoon doodle of her naked, which truly pissed Mills off. Mills goes to see Tracy, who’s doing fine, but he finds clues at her home implicating a second serial killer who was manipulating John Doe.
The remake adds another 30 minutes of underlit, grimy procedural action as he pursues the second man, played by individual else who was large in this era — let’s say Val Kilmer. There is an immense shootout. Kilmer’s character explains his motives at large dimension before dying. Somerset returns to Mills and promises he burned the offensive doodle. Mills perks up and looks a lot better. They share a beer.
Hamlet (1948, 1969, 1990, 1996, 2000, etc.)
Image: Columbia Pictures / Everett Collection
Original ending: Hamlet, prince of Denmark, dithers over whether to kill his treacherous uncle, who murdered Hamlet’s father and married Hamlet’s mother. He pretends to be harmlessly insane to evade suspicion, philosophizes a lot, has any also-treacherous old friends executed, stabs entirely the incorrect person, and is mostly a jerk to his girlfriend. Eventually, nearly everyone dies, Hamlet included.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: Turns out the poison that kills most of the key players at the end of the play was a faulty batch made by those rascals Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who were busy bantering erstwhile they brewed it, and missed a fewer key steps. Hamlet, Laertes, and Gertrude all recover.
Hamlet castigates his mother, who points out that women don’t truly get to make quite a few choices in 1600s Denmark, and castigates Hamlet right back for being a wishy-washy whiner. He philosophizes about this at dimension before admitting he’s indecisive and a bit of a drama queen. He lets Horatio talk him into naming Fortinbras king due to the fact that Hamlet would be terrible at it. Tens of thousands of theatre students around the planet take up his “Should I have made an actual decision at any point in the past 4 hours?” speech for theatrical auditions.
Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Original ending: Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is crucial to America’s wartime efforts to invent an atomic bomb. He becomes death, destroyer of worlds. The U.S. predictably shrugs off his moral concerns about the bomb and rushes it into production. Politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) engineers Oppenheimer’s political downfall, and suffers in turn. past unfolds.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: In the film’s final flashback to Oppenheimer’s gathering with Einstein, the second besides tells the former, “By the way, watch out for that Strauss guy, he’s a snake.” Remembering this advice in the present, Oppenheimer rushes to his laboratory and uses his advanced cognition of physics to invent a time machine.
The final 30 minutes of the movie features Oppenheimer leaping through time, punching Strauss in the face at various moments in past for cathartic effect, then yet sabotaging the atomic bomb research, but winning planet War II anyway by time traveling to Germany at the beginning of the war and shooting Hitler (Taika Waititi, reprising his function from Jojo Rabbit) in the head. Standing over Hitler’s body, he says “Now I am become death, the destroyer of your lame ass.” Nobody wins an Oscar for this version.
Image: Paramount Vantage / Everett Collection
Original ending: Oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) ends his long rivalry with Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) in a definitive fashion. There is, as promised, blood.
Speak No Evil-style remake ending: Daniel and Eli talk for 30 additional minutes about milkshakes and metaphors for capitalism. A 1000 more milkshake memes are spawned. There is no blood. The resultant class-action suit bankrupts manager Paul Thomas Anderson.
